


Point and Shoot

by saiyanshewolf (gossamerstarsxx)



Series: Shot Through the Heart [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Backstory, Dark, Dark Past, Depression, Emotional Baggage, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Guilt, Gunner MacCready - Freeform, Gunners (Fallout) - Freeform, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, MacCready Needs A Hug, Mental Health Issues, Non-Chronological, One Shot, One Shot Collection, Past, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:05:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13978674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gossamerstarsxx/pseuds/saiyanshewolf
Summary: MacCready can explain why he joined the Gunners. What's harder to explain is why he stayed.





	Point and Shoot

**Author's Note:**

> **Notes** : Someone requested more Mac angst, and one of the things I've always wondered about is just how long he spent with the Gunners and how that fit with him trying to help Duncan. I tried to make sense of it here, factoring in Mac's youth (Bethesda pls learn what actual 20 year olds look like I'm begging you) and the in-game allusions to his depression.
> 
>  **Warnings** : Suicidal ideation; minor self-harm.
> 
> Sole Survivor is [Antha](http://saiyanshewolf.tumblr.com/tagged/my+sole+survivor).

# 1.

"You never told me why you left the Gunners."

Antha is curled up on her bedroll across from him. MacCready senses her eyes on him even through the flames. He adjusts his hat with one hand, absently rubbing a scar near his hairline with the other.

"Really gotta ask? After what you saw?"

Antha sits up, holding her blanket around herself like a cloak. "All right. I guess what I'm really asking is why you joined them in the first place."

"Pay was good."

She snorts. "Should have known."

MacCready bites back the instinct to snap at her; he deserves that. After a moment he sighs and leans against the tree stump at his back.

"I'm from the Capital Wasteland," he mutters at length. "Came up here a couple years ago. Made a decent name for myself before I heard the Gunners needed sharpshooters. Big mistake."

"You don't say."

He shoots her an ugly look, but Antha doesn't flinch. Despite the warm glow of the firelight her green eyes are cold. MacCready drops his gaze.

"The Gunners don't exist in the Capital Wasteland, so I didn't know much about them when I joined up. Should have known they were bad news when they insisted on tattooing my damn blood type on me." His lip curls as he continues.  "Figured out pretty quick that they're animals. Kill anything that moves if it gets in their way. They don't care. I went with it 'cause the caps were good. After a while it got to me. So I quit."

He pulls his hat low over his eyes and falls silent, hoping that Antha will leave well enough alone.

"Did they?"

He cocks an eyebrow and glances at her. "Did they what?"

"Tattoo you. Theirs were on their foreheads."

MacCready snorts. "Have you seen one on my forehead?"

"No."

"Exactly. Satisfied?"

"Guess I have to be," she murmurs, and lies down with her back to him.

MacCready scrubs a hand over his mouth and tries to put the exchange out of his mind, but he has four interminable hours of keeping watch ahead. He is soon staring into the flames, shuddering despite the heat of the fire, his mind an endless slideshow of faces in crosshairs, faces with no names, people with no names.

They haunt him, though perhaps not as often as they should.

# 2.

He is 20, too thin and too exhausted, blue eyes underscored in sleepless bruises. The Gunners remind him of the Talon Company, but they're better armed and far more strict.

Strict is fine. Easier. It is all but impossible to negotiate contacts on his own when he can't find reasons to get out of bed and keeps forgetting to eat.

The trial period goes by in a haze of death. MacCready doesn't ask questions.

They tattoo his blood type near his hairline, the way they do for all snipers; the Commonwealth doesn't hold the Gunners in high regard, but there is no telling what kinds of areas he might need to access to pull off a perfect shot. It is easy enough to hide the tattoo under his hat, and he soon forgets it.

He shoots where they point and keeps his head down. Soon after Winlock and Barnes pay him for the first time, he asks for a few days off. They let him go.

Half his pay goes to one of Daisy's caravan, along with a letter. The rest goes to Stimpaks, anti-rads, and cleaning KL-E-0 out of .308s.

Days later he drags himself back to the waystation with his left side slashed to ribbons and glued to his shirt with dried blood. The medic cleans him up without asking questions.

The next few months are a blur.

He shoots where they point and takes the caps and sends most of them south because he doesn't know what else to do, because Duncan is dying and he can't get past the first floor of Med-Tek and he can't ask anyone in his unit for help. Under Winlock and Barnes, attachment is a weakness to be exploited at every turn.

So he says nothing. He holds boys younger than himself at gunpoint and sings _Rocket 69_  in his head while their mothers divulge valuable information in hopes of saving their lives; he picks off settlers unfortunate enough to stumble into Gunner camps and tries not to think too much about Winlock and Barnes ransoming the remains; he helps escort prisoners across the Commonwealth, locking them into makeshift cells and scrawling their affiliation in chalk on the wall nearby.

For the rest of his life he has nightmares about the way they plead with him, curse him, and cry.

But in the moment?

He says nothing.

He shoots where they point, and when what he sees makes him sick, he looks away.

He shoots where they point and doesn't give in to the urge to put them in the crosshairs instead.

Six months in MacCready asks for time off and they give it to him.

Once again he goes to Goodneighbor and sends half his caps and a letter back to the Capital, but this time he leaves with a shotgun, his rifle, five frag grenades, more Stimpaks and anti-rads than he thinks he needs, and more ammo than he knows what to do with.

A week later he stumbles back to the waystation twice as torn up as before, his back, sides, and thighs slashed open, bleeding through makeshift bandages. He hasn't eaten in two days, he's running off water and Stimpaks, but he picks up the medic's bottle of whiskey and starts to drink.

As the medic patches him up, her only comment is that he should get a new hobby.

He nods, knocks back another swallow of whiskey, and waits for oblivion. Waking up the next morning is a bitter disappointment.

Weeks pass.

MacCready loses track of his kill count. He doesn't care. It doesn't matter.

Nothing matters.

Lucy is dead. Duncan is dying - Arya's letters tell him so. He can read between the lines.

_My friend from New Vegas is visiting sometime soon, but he'll be gone by early fall. Can you get home by then? Summer is good for him, but the cold..._

The letters hurt and trying to reply hurts worse, and he begs Daisy to write for him, to tell Arya and Butch that he is doing well, that he's working on getting into Med-Tek, that he'll be home soon. She asks if she should tell them about the Gunners, too, and before MacCready realizes it there are tears coursing down his cheeks and a sob rising in his throat. Mortified, he jerks his hat low over his face and hurries out of Goodneighbor, ignoring the way Daisy pleads for him to wait, to come back, to talk to her.

Talk to her?

He can't talk to her. He can't talk to anyone.

There are no words for the weight that lives in his chest, crushing his heart until it bleeds nothing but guilt. He failed as a husband and he's failing as a father, and the only two people who might even begin to understand are four hundred miles away, taking care of a sick child that isn't theirs, being better parents that he could ever hope to be.

Sleep becomes impossible. Every time he closes his eyes his sees Lucy being torn apart, sees Duncan's lifeless corpse, hears them both whispering like phantoms in his skull:  _Why did you let me die?_

More letters. Arya and Butch are worried. They threaten to come after him and MacCready panics, forcing himself to write the things he had once begged Daisy to write for him, lying to them and hating himself for it. Arya and Butch have been in his life since he was a child, helping him watch over Little Lamplight and had taking him in when he left. Arya had given him the hat he never takes off and Butch had taught him how to use the combat knife he wears on his hip.

That night when MacCready closes his eyes it isn't his wife and son that haunt him, but his adopted ~~parents~~ ~~siblings~~ family.

In his nightmares Arya levels her shotgun at his head and says _I don't know you anymore,_ and Butch twirls his switchblade into his fingers and says _Little punk's no better than Raider_ , and MacCready wakes with tears in his eyes that he hides beneath the brim of his hat.

He starts drinking just to sleep and when he wakes with bruised, bloody knuckles and black eyes, no one asks why.

All they do is point.

MacCready shoots and tries not to think.

Soon he doesn't think at all.

Not really.

Not unless he counts the recurring daydream about putting the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger, but his life doesn't seem worth the effort it would take to end it.

They point.

Numb, he shoots.

The days pass in grey smears.

Every few weeks he receives a letter from Arya, and for a few days he feels again. Happiness and love swell in his chest, struggling with a rising tide of guilt and anguish until the torrent of emotion threatens to drown him, until he welcomes the inevitable return of that blank grey nothingness where existence is all that is required of him.

When they point, he shoots, imagining himself in the crosshairs.

# 3.

The fire has burned to embers. MacCready swallows past the knot in his throat and sits up, stirring the gleaming coals with a stick until the flames leap to life, casting light into the darkness. Leaning forward into the warmth, he swipes tears from his cheeks and closes his eyes.

The memory of that emptiness, that _nothingness,_  haunts him more than the people he's killed. If not for that suffocating apathy he might have been able to leave the Gunners earlier; instead he had done nothing, allowing himself to become little more than a glorified Raider.

MacCready grits his teeth, then winces as a bolt of pain lances through his jaw from one of his broken back molars. He resists the irrational urge to do it again, to hurt himself just because he thinks he deserves it.

In hindsight, casual daydreams about suicide aren't normal; during the year he spent with the Gunners his thoughts often blurred the lines between 'casual daydream' and 'active contemplation.' He was paralyzed by guilt, grief, and fear, far from being in his right mind.

Sometimes that helps him sleep at night. Mostly it doesn't.

It would be easier to forgive himself if he had left as soon as he received Arya's letter about Kieran and Arcade, but he hadn't. Even after receiving multiple letters detailing Duncan's improvement under Arcade's care, it had taken months for him to realize how miserable his existence had become under the Gunners, and weeks after that for him to act, to do something about his own misery.

# 4.

A little over a year after first joining the Gunners, MacCready pushes his payment back into Winlock's hands and leaves, walking away from the waystation with little more than the clothes on his back, his sniper rifle, and less than 150 caps to his name.

With nowhere else to go, he winds up in Goodneighbor and finds himself astonished at the welcome. Daisy is so relieved at the news that she buys his drinks for the rest of the week, and Clair lets him rent a room at the Rexford for such a steep discount that he almost feels bad about accepting it. Even Hancock drops in to say he's glad MacCready left, and offers the Third Rail's VIP room in case MacCready wants to freelance again.

The support is overwhelming and unexpected, and MacCready excuses himself from the celebration early and retreats to his new room at the Rexford before his raw emotions can get the better of him. As he undresses for bed, he catches sight of himself in the cracked floor-length mirror.

His reflection shocks him. Disturbed, he crosses the room for a better look.

His reddish hair is so long that it falls in lank waves around his ears. The blue eyes that peer back at him are sunken and dull, underscored with dark, sleepless shadows, and his hollow cheeks are flecked in patches of stubble and razor burn from months of half-assed knife-blade shaving. Individual ribs stand out against his skin and his pants hang low on his hips, held up by a belt cinched as tight at is it can get, through one of several extra holes that he had gouged himself. A slew of new scars stripe his body, gruesome souvenirs from his ill-fated attempts on Med-Tek.

"You look like shit, my friend," he mumbles, pushing his hair back from his forehead and revealing the blood type tattoo near his hairline. It has faded somewhat, but unless his hair hangs into his face or he's wearing his hat, he can't hide it.

The tattoo unnerves him worse than any other part of his ragged reflection. Acting on impulse, he pulls his combat knife out of its sheath on his hip, brings the upper edge of the blade to his forehead, and digs it beneath the skin with a hiss of pain. He carves the little **B+**  away as if peeling bark off a piece of wood, then flings the bit of skin into the trash with a pair of Gunner glasses he'd snapped in half while he unpacked.

Blood trickles down his forehead, bisecting his face along the edge of his nose. MacCready stares at himself for a moment, then grins, swiping the blood away with the heel of his hand as he fishes in his pocket for his lighter. He holds the tip of his knife above the flame, then presses it against the tiny wound to cauterize it.

The pain barely registers beneath his laughter.

# 5.

MacCready runs a fingertip over the indentation near his hairline, still staring into the fire. It had been the right decision to leave the Gunners, even if he didn't make half as many caps working on his own. It was worth it just to sleep through the night...until Winlock and Barnes paid him the first of many visits.

He's been sleeping with one eye open ever since.

On the other side of the campfire, Antha stirs in her sleep, shaking MacCready out of his own head. He glances up and watches as she tosses and turns, shivering despite the fire and the thick blanket around her shoulders.

Knees popping, he gets to his feet, grabs the blanket from his own bedroll, and steps around the campfire to spread it over Antha. There is no reason to wake her to stand watch when he won't be sleeping tonight.

She settles beneath the added warmth and MacCready retreats to his side of the fire, gazing at her sleeping form through the flames. He wonders about her son, wonders if she is still trying to find him, if she has ever hit such a brick wall in her search that she...

_No. Not her._

Antha wouldn't freeze up in the face of her own pain. Antha acts - often recklessly, yes, but she acts. He can't image her being as weak and selfish as he had been during his stint with the Gunners.

She had asked why he joined them; he had answered truthfully.

Why does it feel like a lie?

_Because joining them was one thing, but sticking with them for a year was another._

He can never explain that. How could he? How could he tell her that he had stayed because he was too numb to care? That he hadn't seen a point in living when his only plan for the future was to put a bullet in his brain?

MacCready runs his fingers over the scar on his forehead and watches the flames dance with a sneer curling his lip.

_Pathetic._

Maybe, but there is no reason for Antha to know that.


End file.
